Understanding Keywords

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What are keywords?

The keywords that you target will be the foundation of your search campaign. Remember, keywords are what consumers input into a search engine to find your product. Now, if you want to be pedantic, whatever someone types into the search box is actually called a search query. However, for the moment, let's just call them keywords! So in a sense, these are the beginning of the process for both you and the searcher. And they act as signals to tell the AI-powered algorithms at the heart of Google Ads who to show your ads to.

Getting keywords right

You must spend time getting your keywords choices correct as this will determine the type of searchers you bring to your website. Choose appropriate keywords that relate to your product, its benefits, and specific consumer needs. Consider the searcher intent. What are they trying to do? Are they ready to buy? Are they only researching?

Whatever they are trying to achieve can be inferred from the keyword itself, so it’s important to focus on the type of keywords that drive priority actions for your business. These might be keywords that include words like ‘buy’, ‘order’, ‘book’, or ‘cost’. For example, ‘buy groceries online’, ‘order a taxi’, ‘book a flight’, or ‘mobile phone cost’. When people use these words in their search, they are usually trying to complete a purchase or transaction.

We can figure out what people are likely to do when they look for certain keywords and we can then prioritize the keywords that drive valuable actions on our website. To optimize your performance in this regard, you can have different ads and landing pages for different keywords in your campaigns, and campaigns will typically have multiple keywords to cover many potential searches.

Keyword lists

This leads to the creation of keyword lists. These are the words or word combinations that you would like your ad to show up for when a potential customer searches. And when you group a number of similar keywords together into a list, that is called an Ad Group.

There are many tools available to search marketers to help create relevant keyword lists, and, later in this module, we’ll look at how you can create keyword lists and use these keyword planning tools to simplify the process further.

Keywords and Ad Groups

For now, let’s focus our attention on understanding Ad Groups.

Ad Groups are lists of keywords grouped into similar themes. You can think of an Ad Group as the way you organize your keyword lists because your keywords are stored in Ad Groups. From there, you create ad text or ad copy for that keyword list.

You don’t have to just think of every single possible keyword your audience might be using when you’re creating an Ad Group. You can input your initial keyword list into Google, and Google will use its tools and what’s happening in the wider market to expand that list for you, suggesting new keywords variations, different keywords you might not have previously thought of before, all to help improve your campaign. These tools use your historical data and several other factors to deliver up hundreds of keywords that you can choose to input into your campaigns, or not.

Moreover, this is a kind of market research because Google will show you what keyword searches are currently trending in your industry, and that’s valuable information. You can then choose to add these new keywords if you believe they are relevant and likely to drive business for your organization, or of course, you can ignore these suggestions if you don’t think that they are any good for you.

Ad Group best practice

It’s important to identify your top keywords and keep them organized. The best practice here is to group your keywords by theme and write ads that can easily service any of the keywords in that keyword list or Ad Group.

For example, an online electrical store would group all Samsung TV keywords in one Ad Group and all Sony TV keywords in another Ad Group. This is because ads are associated with a single Ad Group, all the Samsung keywords would be serviced by an ad that mentions Samsung, and all the Sony keywords would use an ad that mentions Sony. What would happen if we mixed Sony and Samsung keywords together in the same Ad Group? Well, then we couldn't write an ad that's specific to each brand and, as a result, we’d get fewer clicks and fewer sales.

This type of thinking helps to keep things clear and organized, especially when it comes to writing ads or running promotions on a specific product line once the campaign is launched.

Driving business objectives

Keyword lists are also important in terms of driving business objectives. How do they do this?

Search intent

Well, you can consider creating lists around the type of search intent you’re targeting. For example, you can have keyword lists that focus on:

• Information, or Top of Funnel searches
• Consideration, or Middle of Funnel searches, and
• Conversion and sales queries, or Bottom of Funnel searches.

By refining your keyword lists in this way, you are tailoring your marketing activity to ensure that it aligns with an agreed business objective and the purchase journey. All of this should lead to better results from your campaigns.

Keyword function

Having an exhaustive list of keywords that your target audience is likely to search for is essential to building online coverage. This ensures your brand is visible for the most valuable searches in the purchase journey. It’s therefore important to know the function of each keyword and assign budgets to each campaign depending on the part they play in a conversion.

Negative keywords

An important but sometimes overlooked use of keyword lists is in the creation of negative keywords. In other words, you can specify search queries that you don’t want to appear for and manage your brand reputation and keyword associations. This makes your campaigns more cost effective by stopping your ads from spending budget on low-conversion or low-value searches. Secondly, you are also being proactive in avoiding bad online brand associations and, since our brand image is crucial to success, negative keyword lists play a huge role in supporting overarching business objectives.